• Member Since 24th Apr, 2012
  • offline last seen Yesterday

Wise Cracker


Just some guy.

More Blog Posts299

  • 13 weeks
    Early New Year's resolutions, and Old Year's conclusions

    Well, another year's come and gone. How did the resolutions go? Half and half in my case. Managed to partially accomplish what I set out to do, moving from wondering how to do things to figuring out what to do. I believe I've successfully identified the habits that are hampering or even harmful to me, so that's progress.

    Resolutions for the new year?

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    3 comments · 53 views
  • 37 weeks
    Summer update 2: What's Sticking to the Wall?

    Quick update on future plans.

    Still working on the original stuff, I think I'm down to the last rewrite of what I wanted to do, only question is what to change in terms of details. Art's had some progress, but work responsibilities and sweet, sweet sleeping problems have caused disruptions.

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    0 comments · 83 views
  • 43 weeks
    Summer update: what next?

    Honestly? Not sure. I never publish anything that's not complete, so I'm not breaking any promises there. Thing is, I haven't started on anything new yet, and hadn't lined anything up before the previous one.

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    2 comments · 102 views
  • 51 weeks
    Spring update: Changeling Beauty Contest, and other stuff.

    Been a while since I did one of these. Story stuff first.

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    1 comments · 147 views
  • 67 weeks
    Preview and update: Shining Armour's Checklist.

    Hey, all. Just popping in to say I'll be trying to stick to some better habits in the future. I'm cutting down on all the sites that are distracting or otherwise leading to bad and unhealthy behaviour on my end. As such, I'll only be logging in when I have something to publish from now on. I'll also keep communication while I'm logged in to a minimum, just to avoid any unpleasantness. Hopefully

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    0 comments · 144 views
Oct
18th
2017

Interlude: Random Game Ideas for More Talented People. · 2:16pm Oct 18th, 2017

Hey, all.

The magic blog thing has been slow due to real life shenanigans slowing down everything else (again), but rest assured I will be getting to it soon. I've adjusted my scheduling habits, and I've caught some glimpses of the new Season, too; it started airing in the dubbed version just this week. Like, I saw Flurry Heart trying to help the Cake twins this morning, and they just mobbed her. That episode. I'm not watching whole episodes in Dutch, though.

Anyhoot! I said I'd make an effort to provide more quality content and reduce whining, so while you wait for the 'learning magic' thing, here's three sort-of educational games that would be perfect to release in the current state of the world.

Pony Tropico.

The base game: Tropico. You play a (mostly) benevolent dictator building up your economy, managing diplomacy with various factions, and working towards certain goals. Residents flow in through native birth or immigration, and each resident has a tiny character model and behaviour that you can play around with.

The twist: make the residents ponies, or other various fantasy races. Now you have to balance out different types of farmland, take into account racial tensions, and adapt your population to the terrain, like deciding between building a wizard's academy for your unicorn residents or listening to the Earth Pony Master Race Party and making economy rely entirely on food exports... without the benefit of imported pegasus weather management.

Why? People have been asking for a new Warcraft game for ages (that's the RTS game with heroes, not the MMORPG one), and while ponies do get aggressive at times on the show, there's no real link with violent stereotypes just yet, letting it lean more towards a management game. You can make El Presidente a hero character of sorts, and if you're so inclined, you can toss in educational hints about ecosystem stability and how food chains are set up: if you get this, you need this past a certain point. Also, you know, basic economics.

Gaming Machine Builder Simulator

The base game: Big Pharma. You're put in charge of a series of rooms that you build full of conveyor belts and various processing units to turn incoming ingredients into fully functional medicines. Profits will change depending on the demand of said medicines. "Curing Cancer" may sound like a good idea, but it can drive you out of business.

The twist: swap out the ingredients for pc or console parts. Now you're dependent not on how you eradicate disease, but how cost efficient your produced hardware is relative to that of your audience. Random events would include new games being released or lawsuits banning certain games. Except your hardware's reception is not binary, like it is with disease, but threshold-based: where a top 'supercure' would make itself obsolete in time, a top supercomputer is so expensive no one buys it.

Why? Big Pharma is interesting in that shows through its mechanics what kind of balance the pharma industry has to strike, by design. Being able to do the same for hardware sounds like an interesting idea. Besides that, even just making a game that shows how different pc or console parts interact with each other can also be useful.

Fashion Simulator.

The base game: any of the Flash dress-up games that litter the Internet and get sprayed over YouTube with Let's Plays for some bizarre reason.

The twist: It actually gets a plot and mechanics. For the sake of argument, let's say you're playing as Rarity's apprentice. The ponies coming in all want to look nice, it's your job to get their dresses just right. As you do so, they start talking about real life political things or some other subplot that's going on in the overworld, like a visual novel. But the main gameplay revolves around dressing up ponies. This one would be the most 'edutainment' type of game, with tutorials explaining complementary colours, colour theory in general, or how the eye can be led. On top of the dialogue system, you could maybe purposely upset members of a certain faction to get different endings.

Why? With the Emoji movie and... well, everything that came before it recently, it seems like anything 'girly' is being demonised or just misrepresented again. A game that's mostly about just making something that looks nice probably wouldn't make much of a splash, but it would at least get some traction in younger audiences. Besides that, there is a real science to colour theory, and having a creative way to teach it seems only fair, with games like Recettear or whatever it's called doing the same for basic economics.

And why ponies again? Doesn't need to be; any animal will do. But it needs to be animals, because doing this with human characters is just asking for trouble.

Anyway, those are some ideas to get the creative juices flowing. If any of them exist already, please let me know. And let me know what you would make if you were despot in the business.

Somewhat related music video below. Cracker out.

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